"A good rating system would stimulate healthy competitionand give every zoo a relevant target."(Maple, 1995)

Hoping to find the criteria for a good rating system, I enrolled at
the University of Georgia in 1998. The motivation to work on this topic
came from an observation that I made very often since I got interested
in zoo design:

When designing new zoo exhibits, zoo directors and their professionals
often do not profit from experiences others have already gained with similar
or even the same type of exhibit. This happens because the information
on strengths and weaknesses of existing exhibits is either hard to find
and to evaluate or not available at all. This results in unnecessary experiments,
‘reinventing the wheel’ again and again or copying what was done elsewhere.
The consequences of these approaches often are:

Poor conditions for animals,

poor educational performance,

poor conservation results and

poor use of resources (animals, efforts and money).

I started my research by writing a proposal and sending it to zoo directors
and zoo designers in Europe, Australia and the United States. My suggestions
were to:

develop criteria for the assessment of zoo exhibits that are already built,

create suitable instruments to publish assessments of zoo exhibits,

publish updated and standardized information on zoo exhibits, such as assessments,
costs, and information on skilled professionals,

improve public awareness on appropriate zoo design, and thus

create competition among zoos to accomplish assessment criteria.

The feedback I got from several experienced professionals first was not
very encouraging:

There were doubts that any given set of criteria could deal with the
rapidly changing trends and the relationship between exhibit design and
operation. Also, criteria for assessments are always based on a specific
philosophy. But, there is no one right philosophy of zoo design. Furthermore,
there was the fear from designers that information on top quality exhibits
would encourage copycats who may not have the skill or experience to use
the information properly. Finally, some zoo directors were not very interested
in having their exhibits assessed.

However, most respondents found assessments of zoo exhibits and their
publication useful.

I therefore changed my concept and the focus of my research. Then, I
decided to develop a standard for describing animal exhibits and to have
others judge them based on these standardized descriptions. In order to
test my concept I designed a pilot project. The medium best suited for
my approach seemed to be the internet. Communication by email is
cheap and fast. A survey can be conducted on the internet within a relatively
short time. A website is illustrative but cheap to create and disseminate
relative to any other medium. Thus, I created a website as my pilot project.

The results of these efforts proved to be much more promising. The following
chapters describe the background to and the development of the pilot project,
give an evaluation of the project, and discuss future options.